Customer Reviews

Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

One of the problems with previous books about .Net programming for Office is that they tended to get bogged down discussing differences between versions of Office, differences between versions of Visual Studio Tools for Office, and differences betwee C# and VB.Net. This often left comparatively little room for thoughtful discussion of fundamental principles and advanced concepts.

In Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook, authors Eric Carter and Eric Lippert avoid this problem by focusing on one version of Office (2007), one version of VSTO (2008), and one language (C#). The result is a highly readable book that takes you from zero to sixty (to use some car lingo) in seconds flat.

Part I discusses the special challenges of using managed code to control still-COM-based Office applications. The nice thing about this discussion is that it gets all the bad news out of the way right in the beginning, and it helps you see that the bad news isn't all that bad, and in any case there's surprisingly little of it. After less than 90 pages, you feel very well grounded in the fundamentals of .Net-to-Office interoperability. The discussion of interfaces, delegates, and events on Pages 44-49 is so valuable that it justifies the price of the book all by itself. That discussion is followed by another incredibly valuable discussion of three types of Office solutions, which discussion truly sets the stage for the rest of the book.

And get this: The rest of the book keeps right on delivering value.

Part II provides three chapters apiece on Excel, Word, and Outlook.The first chapter on each application addresses special considerations when interoperating with that application. The second chapter covers events for that application, and the third covers that application's object model. I have never seen a more sensible and authoritative introduction to the Office application object models than those presented in this book.

Part III is devoted to topics specific to VSTO as a development toolset. This is where you'll find chapters on the VSTO programming model, using Windows forms and WPF in VSTO, working with document-level and application-level task panes, working with Outlook forms regions, working with the ribbon, working with Smart Tags, working with data, and deploying solutions with VSTO's new click-once deployment capability.

Some people will complain that this book has too narrow a focus, but I feel strongly that the focus is exactly right, and I say that as someone with a VB background. Anyone who has ever waded through a book that tries to cover every version of Office, every version of VSTO, and both VB.Net and C# knows that such an approach tries to satisfy everyone but ends up satisfying no one. This book has an integrity of vision and a quality of execution that helps you quickly grasp the broad outlines of the technology and then wade into the details as deeply as you care to go. It is the best book I've found on .Net programming for Office.

This book is awesome. It covers everything you need to know to develop professional level VSTO applications with Visual Studio 2008.

I am glad this book was written using C# as a programming language. In the past VBA left a lot to be desired, enough so that I never took Office programming serious at all. When 2003 came out it sparked my interest, but I ran into enough pain right out of the box to drop it fast. This book has renewed my hope that I can start taking Office application seriously. By using C# the authors reaffirmed this is not VBA anymore. Had I browsed this book and found it to be written in VB.NET I would not have given Office 2007 VSTO another shot, because I would have thought the toolset was still lost in the VBA world.

For VB'ers... the authors do point out the differences in VB and C# where appropriate, they just do not provide code samples of each.

There are still a lot of traces of the crazy COM programming interfaces in the interops, but this book does a great job of pointing them out and shows you how to work with them. The "missing" and "ref missing" make the most elegant code look psychotic. It will be nice to have the C# 4.0 named and optional arguments feature to remedy the "missing" and "ref missing" messes.

The one complaint I have is about the code library that goes along with the book. There isn't one. The only thing made available is word documents that have the code listings from the Chapters cut and pasted from the book's manuscript.

All in all I do not think anyone developing VSTO should be without this book, and those that aren't developing VSTO should buy the book to educate themselves about the value the technology now provides.

I know quite a lot about Excel VBA and decided to get mt feet wet in the VSTO side of things. This looked like quite a sensible thing to do imo since , although VBA is not going to be dropped by MS, it's not going to be developed as much (if any) in the future.

I have to say, I think the transition is much harder than i expected. Why? Well looking at the examples I've found on the web / other VSTO books everything is either ambiguous or hard to see the woods for the trees. This is something I believe that this book rectifies.

It's simply the best VSTO book I've seen, and its with C# - double bonus for me! Most books in this area are VB. Some of these other books I've looked at were with utter disbelief! This book is sitting in the top drawer and has about 95% of what you'll need.
It doesn't cover the Excel VBA model in great detail. I beleieve this to actually be a good thing. Covering this would 1. double the size of the book. 2. Take the focus away from what its trying to achieve - actually using VSTO. (BTW, the actual model content that is included is, what I believe, the correct content to get you started to a decent developers level. You're not going to be able to code hardcore spreadsheets, but its a step in the right direction.)

It covers more than Excel (word and outlook are included), so i really skipped those sections more or less. Something that's easily done with this book due to its layout.

The only bad thing I would say about this book is that it points out how remarkably good VSTO actually is!! The 'hard' parts of Excel VBA development (I'm talking smart tags, ribbon modifications and the likes) are made rediculously easy. After being exposed to the power of office development with .NET, going back to a VBA environment would bring tears to a glass eye! :)

I had been using VSTO 3.0 for a few weeks and wanted to gain more of an expert knowledge, so that I could optimize performance in our application. I already had a working knowledge of VSTO, and this book really did not help. I believe it is better targeted towards people who are unfamiliar with the technology. Just keep that in mind before purchase. The quality is fairly good, and it's an easy read, it just didn't have the advanced knowledge I was looking for.

This is one of the best software books I've read. Very clear and complete, without useless fluff. Excellent description of Office software automation in general, and the use of VSTO to accomplish that automation. They give specific suggestions for the best way to accomplish tasks, as well as explaining why that's their preferred approach. An added bonus is that it's well written and enjoyable reading.

Basically, it's a C# book how to integrate/extend the VBA technology into the VSTO framework. The trouble is it does not have the same comprehensive framework as any other even most advanced books on either C# or VBA. It presupposes great knowledge of VBA but most importantly C#. If you are learning VBA it's not worth having it. But even for a seasoned VBA/C# programmer, the book is full of conceptual discussions with very little code, samples or actual implementations. E.g the whole Chapter 3 (Programming Excel) has only two small tables of code but curiously probably 30+ Excel gui printouts. To me it seems as if the authors really cut corners on the book production - it's full of graphics, but it's not really relevant to understanding the actual implementations; personally they feel like fillers of otherwise pretty theoretical and strange text.

So in summary, this book is more about philosophy/conceptual framework of VSTO and its relationship to VBA and is not about any implementation details. The graphics presented is useless text fillers which are either trivial or are simple screenshots from Excel. Rubbish.

Great reference book -- enough that I bought both the paperback and kindle verions. It provides a ton of insight into VSTO tools and how to approach building VSTO add-ins.

However, it is a more of a reference book than a learn to code book. So, the examples are very specifically focused to buidling a particular Add-In ... vice building an entire project of inter-related functions.

But, it is a must have for anyone developing VSTO add-ins.

Hello,

I read that book as an introduction to Outlook programming. This book uses C# and Visual Studio 2008 for all the examples. I loved the book, nothing is left to interpretation, everything is clear from the start to the end. Perfect book to start with.
I was interested in Outlook add-in only, and there are a couple chapters dedicated on that and form region. Other chapters applies to any office add-in.
I bought another book (Programming application office outlook 2007 from Byrne and Gregg), so I can digg deeper into Outlook objects model, but Carter & Lippert's book covered a lot, I won't need the other book as much as a tought I would at first.

I would recommend this book to anyone starting with Office Programming.

Very comprehensive introduction into the 'art of programming excel' and other office tools. Easy to follow, and lot's of examples. I would buy it again.

I was disappointed in this book for four reasons:

1. Its lack of attention to important advanced topics such as Web services integration. In this day and age of integration, how can you not cover it?

2. The section on RibbonUI coding was disappointing. The authors refer to the awkward XML Fluent programming approach that non-VSTO developers have to take, but then they don't give you a compelling writeup on how you can ditch the non-VSTO approach.

3. More focus is needed. I need to work with Excel, not Word or Outlook so I found myself wading through pages I didn't need. This book would be better served broken out into separate books on each of the Office products.

4. Dense examples with too few figures: why are step-by-step instructions embedded into dense hard to read paragraphs. Why not break them out into bullets? And the examples need more figures to illustrate them.

On the positive side the book is well-researched and contains some useful nuggets of information. I don't know if there is a better alternative book out there at this time. In summary, I did not get nearly enough useful information out of this book and I would only recommend it if you are completely new to VSTO and VBA programming.